Yesterdays!

Right since dawn, my mother had been busy drawing out all the trunks which had been not been moved an inch since we shifted to this house. She was busy looking for a black dairy that belonged to my paternal grandfather when he was in his teen years. I remember my father always told me that there is not a single Bengali boy who has never tried writing some poems at least once in his life. Funny it had sounded to me then as I was yet to hit that spot in my life; my life experiences had been pretty docile till then. After burning a marathon of calories and a little delay in our daily breakfast, my mother was successful in identifying that dilapidated black diary from the inside of a trunk, the top of which read, “In the loving memory of”.

I went to the room where my grandfather was lying, not always surrounded by the continuous beeps of life supporting equipments   but always needing the help of a nurse. This morning too he was lying down, looking outside through the window. The sun was shining way too brightly for a December morning. My mother went ahead and gently handed over the diary to my grandfather, who took a few seconds to recognise the object just handed over to him. My mother sat on the bed beside my grandfather and smiled at him. She asked him politely about how he was feeling that morning to which he softly nodded his head and looked away outside through the window, holding the diary close to his chest.

A sudden gush of thoughts flooded his mind, as he finally opened the first page of his diary. He could still recognise his own handwriting which read, “To Su, and to all the other crushes in between!” He smiled at himself and turned the page over. His initial few poems were in Bengali mainly influenced by the music he followed at that time. He remembered the first poem he had penned down in this diary was dedicated to a girl from his high school days. She was like a breath of fresh air, whenever he used to hang out in the park behind his home. Every evening the sole reason he went to that park was to see if she had come, just to get a glimpse of her while he used to field for his gully cricket team. He described her in his own words as a ‘woman of my dreams’. She was elder to him, a couple of years nevertheless had quite a face to look astonishingly at. He wrote that, whenever he used to notice her sitting on the bench, he used to get enchanted in the long hair that she always used to let loose. He had always been attracted towards women with long hair who used to keep it open. In the weeks that went by, he never gathered the courage to talk to her once although he had created several opportunities for himself to initiate a conversation with her. He closed his eyes for a few moments before he turned over the leaf again.

This time his eyes were set upon a letter, he had received in the fag end of his high school days from a girl who apparently had a crush on him. “Well”, he thought, “that, must have taken some courage”. She described how she liked him but failed to tell him face to face. He thought how she might be so many years later, was she even alive? Did she even stay in India anymore? Then as he browsed through the rest of the pages, he came across all those small farewell notes that his classmates had written to him when their school-life was almost over. All those days, memories of them, rushed back to his mind- most of them were no more today. The last time they had met was 4 years back, just before he had fallen ill in a miserable manner. It was the wedding ceremony of Ayan’s younger daughter. Ayan had passed away the following year, and so did Jeet.

He was 2 years into college when he met Sunanda or Su, as he used to call her when finally love had started blossoming between them. He had always been a hapless romantic, he thought to himself holding the diary. She was about to pass out high school when they met. He went to their school for a program. That was their first interaction, which was where he met the love of his life. When she joined the same college, and the same branch of engineering, they realised it was meant to be and they were destined to stay together. Most part of the second half of his diary was filled with all those small incidents, chits, sticky notes, ever exchanged between them prior to their marriage. He started reading them one by one as his eyes swelled up with tears, his breath getting heavier, as he remembered the day she was breathing her last in the same bed that he was lying down on today. He suddenly felt as if someone was sitting right beside him, he looked around only to find no one other than his thoughts of all the memories that they had shared together. The sun had suddenly gone behind the clouds. Suddenly, it was all grey around just like it was in his mind. He called the nurse softly and asked her to keep the diary by his bed on his table. He took of his reading glasses and held it over his chest. He closed his eyes and the only picture that came to his mind was the first time he and Su had gone for a trip together. One night, sitting under the moon, she had said, “I pray that I depart this mortal world before you, because you can stay without me, but I can’t.” At that time little did they know that, this would actually turn out to be true and he had laughed it off at that time, he wouldn’t have done so, had he known back then only if he knew, that it would be the other way round.